ART CITIES: Tokyo-Thomas Houseago

Thomas Houseago brings a vanguard approach to sculpture’s original subject, the human body. Utilizing mediums associated with classical and modernist sculpture, such as carved wood, clay, plaster, and bronze, as well as less traditional materials like rebar and hemp, Houseago builds monumental figures rife with the traces of their making.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Blum Gallery Archive

Thomas Houseago presents “Moon”, his first exhibition in Japan. The central work of this exhibition presented in Tokyo, entitled “Moon Tapestry for Tokyo (for D.S. and Basho)” (2024), captures Houseago’s amazement by the infinite moods the moon is able to radiate. This tapestry literally embraces the show, a color-intense time-scape painting of night and day, on which the artist worked for over a month outside. Almost as a silent witness, an owl painting came into being alongside, with a set of new flower works, and a composition of an elder tree, which can also be seen as a constant in his work. The transmutation of these universal symbols throughout cultures and ages offers the capacity to provide steadiness in a world falling apart. From that respect, Houseago’s work is one of connection and of providing foundation—an aspect which also materializes in a set of smaller, diary-like paintings, which are comparable to daily meditations. As massive as his works may appear, they remain precarious and operate on the verge of collapse, which can be said about his unique approach in general—an artistic practice that has always operated restlessly and without any safety nets in its search for the next shell to break. Houseago’s sculptures, which range from monumental to smaller-scale works, have a striking ability to simultaneously convey states of power and vulnerability. The artist uses materials associated with classical and modernist sculpture (such as carved wood, clay, plaster and bronze), as well as the less traditional (steel rods, concrete and hessian), to emphatically reveal the creative processes that drive his practice. He typically combines elements rendered in flat portions of wood with others sculpted in the round, together with hand-drawn components that are cast and printed onto the works in a technical tour-de-force. Whilst Houseago’s oeuvre can be seen as a continuation of a historical sculptural tradition, the unusual combinations of materials, references to popular culture and the interplay between two- and three-dimensions all serve to challenge the hierarchy inherent within visual forms, and the materials and values with which they are associated. The artist also creates two-dimensional works on canvas and paper, which he describes as a cross between ‘drawing and mapping’. His more recent paintings, executed in a vivid array of hues, are an exploration of the emotional and spatial power of color. Houseago has recently relocated to a large outdoor studio close to the beachfront in Malibu, a refuge that puts him in immediate proximity to nature and its processes of change. While his earlier sculptural work reanimated hidden forms of mythical knowledge, nowadays, the wilderness itself is a co-author of his works. Large-scale canvasses and tapestries spread out on the earthy grass, and together the sun and its infinite array of color scales imprint the universe’s agencies onto these works. This occurrence is not only a gesture of sharing authorship with planetary forces, but a reminder to us that we’re part of something larger. In recent years, too, more distant forms of knowledge began to inform the artist: the California coastline could be also read as a segue to Japan on the other side of the Pacific—between them only the vastness of the ocean. Houseago has become fascinated by Japanese haiku, along with its unique quality in giving the most elegant shape to ungraspable universal impressions mirrored in the spare words of one individual poet. Countless poets have focused on the subject of the moon, considering that the night, along with its shadows, is the preferred state in Japan.

Photo: Thomas Houseago, Treehouse Sunset (my bedroom), 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 19 7/8 x 24 x 2 1/4 inches, Photo: Hannah Mjølsnes, © Thomas Houseago, Courtesy the artist and Blum Gallery

Info: Blum Gallery, Harajuku Jingu-no-mori 5F, 1-14-34 Jingumae, Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan, Duration: 5/7-7/9/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, www.blum-gallery.com/